


And jars two hemispheres

by altairattorney



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: AU, Gen, same coin theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-11 11:14:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11147265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altairattorney/pseuds/altairattorney
Summary: How do you know you are useless, Stanley?





	And jars two hemispheres

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WDW](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WDW/gifts), [RenMorris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RenMorris/gifts).



> A humble homage to renmorris and WDW's Same Coin theory, which I hold dear and I like as few other fandom theories. Just to spread some love.

The day he is born, the sun wakes up with him. It cuts the ease of early summer in half, and it rages on for hours – scorching the sand without rest, jumbling memories, lost to the hottest day anyone remembers in a long, long time.

The heat refuses to stop until he opens his eyes. Touched by the fresh breeze, his brand new gaze lets the world in. If clouded, if unaware, it reaches beyond what it can grasp.

His twin sleeps soundly by his side, ever enclosed in his weird bubble of wisdom. It does not touch him, though. He points his arms to the sky instead, wailing, just at the edge of the bright steel rectangle.

Past the window, the ocean rolls in its constant song. Its existence spreads out without contours, a picture of waves and smoky clouds.

It is a memory, or an omen. When it evaporates, the blue water calls to him, and its voice lulls him back to sleep.  
  
*

 _How do you know you are useless, Stanley?_  
  
He does. That’s all there is to it. He has little care for how much his mom insists – thatquestion lives at the back of his head, a refrain, in tune with the constancy of his heartbeat.

_We care about you, me and Dad. We wanted you to exist. We wanted you here._

No use. He knows what to trust. The idea has been there longer than he can remember, feather-light yet haunting. He feels it and expects it as it is; a cold caress at the back of his neck, whenever Ford is not there to distract him. 

_If you were useless, why would you be here?_

Why? Sometimes he still crawls in, among dead algae and stones, just for the sake of feeling lonelier. Why? He yells the question at an abandoned cave, long ago emptied of their small footsteps.

His echo is the only reply. As it is meant to be, he thinks. He is useless to himself and to others – now that life is moving forward, now that he is losing him, Stanley means nothing.  
  
Rare are the times when the echo speaks back. It’s night and he is high on blues and disbelief, and it’s all in his mind for sure, but still –

 _Why now?_  
  
– still the words change, and the cave comes alight with his grin;

 _Why are you here?_  
  
*

He comes to identify it as the _strange thing._  
  
A trace in his childhood, a raging storm in his youth. The scream which sometimes rises at the edge of his mind, now that Ford is long gone and home is an abstract concept.

It doesn’t even _begin_. It kicks in when he least expects it – or in the least appropriate moments, should he say. Like when he is lost on a northern Maine highway, and the _strange thing_ hovers above him, imminent, the same way the incoming snowstorm does.

Stanley focuses but on driving, desperate with hope for a motel to show. It isn’t his fault if the sky lowers its eyelids, and the highway seems to split in infinite more roads – all the bends and the dead ends he could imagine, eaten away by darkness wherever his headlights can’t reach.

How can he feel like this, he screams, knuckles white around the wheel. How can he feel like he isn’t himself, yet has been himself for billions of years. And he’d want to pull over, he’d want it a different way, a rough turn off the road to escape this path. 

He must watch his vehicle rush straight on. One terrifying destiny, stretched out for him to follow.

It comes to a halt – and he finds himself immobile, heaving as if someone had tried to drown him. The winter sky is clear. Not an inch of snow is there to be seen on the ground.

He restarts the engine, just to hear the questions in its lament.  
__  
_Why am I here?_  
  
*

That a threat is coming, he does not need to hear from them.

Stanley knew the place was bad news from the very start; he knew when his daytime terrors turned into dreams, and the first night of sleep won him over.

For a while, he deluded himself into thinking the _strange things_ were gone forever. He was wrong. They remained, in a semi-dormant state; well beneath the glimmer of his self-made role, well beneath his house, on the table his head rested on. He smelled aged paper in his sleep, and it began.

He roamed the same sealed room in every dream. Shut out from the world, he curled on the ground, trembling – and laughter, a lone threat from the outside, nailed him into place.

Laughter pierced through his eardrums, furious. Untiring, it flung itself against the walls to break them. It wanted in his room like nothing else in the world; but time and time again it yelled at him, in insane defeat.

 _Why?_  
  
For years, his dream self dared not move.

The backwards voices began with Ford’s return. When he closed his ears to block out laughter, the sirens filled them. They would speaks of truths he had never learnt – nor he would ever learnt them, or make them intelligible.

Even now, with a foreign vibration in the air, the core of the dream remains the same. He cannot, for the life of him, tell why he is there in the first place.

The night before it happens, he dreams of a shooting star carved in his palm. As much as his weakness lets him, he smiles to it. 

The star itself freezes his lips into place. _Too soon_. Four points, four corners, molten colors that twist. _Too late –_  
  
and when the sky splits open above his head, mirroring his soul, he finally does the math.  
  
Whatever it is, it can’t be helped.

*

Stanley decrees when it is over. The door slams like a bell toll at his back, so he can think – if he can’t escape his path, he’ll embrace it.  
  
_(At last.)_

Stanley understands – even more so, on a deeper layer. A breath of destiny lies in each of the words he speaks; if he could see, if he could describe, he would say the universe held its breath until they’d be here.

_(Again.)_

He sets to speak, master of his own words. At the edge of his skin, the touch of an all-consuming fire. 

_(Again.)_  
  
Bill screams. He doesn’t pay attention. Eye as a mirror, he digs deep in it, contemplating all he once wished for. 

He knows for a fact Bill may not lie. Why he can’t say, but he still knows. He can see how he’d give in to infinity – how he could snap his fingers, and the world would bend to them.

_(Again.)_

He clenches his fist. No crossroads now.

That just isn’t the choice he is going to make.  
__  
(Not this time.)  
  
*

Glasses, pairs. Showing reflections. His gaze finds peace, raised towards the opening everything came from.

Within his eyes, the tear mends itself, restoring order to the broken fabric. Almost asleep, he draws a breath of relief.

In another location – space and time – the ocean winds rise to sweep the land, and their caress calms the fury of the sun. 

It is a call, and the sea answers. The waves put out the fire.

Beyond words, here and there, he feels it happen. 


End file.
